The correctional education literature on democracy promises that teaching methods can be improved by using participatory management techniques. The related literature on cognitive processes provides specific findings on why participatory management produces substantial learning gains, especially regarding interpersonal cognitive decisionmaking. Cognitive development tailored to interface with identified offender interpersonal learning deficits can be accelerated within a democratic milieu. The reigning correctional paradigm, however, is coercive and bureaucratic/manipulative, and the reigning education paradigm is behavioral. Correctional educators should take more notice of the books by Tannenbaum on the foremost correctional education/democracy experiment of the century and of the writings of Ross and Fabiana (a cognitive model for offender rehabilitation) as well as other referenced materials. 1 figure and 33 references.